Spencer Ludwig, a downhearted middle-aged film-maker, flies to New York to help look after his dying father. Jimmy Ludwig, once a successful attorney, now struggles to make himself understood after a stroke. Cranky and spiteful, he is drifting through his last days solving jigsaw puzzles and ignoring his wife, whose words he waves away like flies.

Ever the director, Spencer can't resist intervening in the action. Driving his father back from a doctor's appointment, Spencer decides they should hit the road. Mobile phones bouncing on the road behind them, they head for Atlantic City to a trashy film festival showing Spencer's work. As he drives, Spencer tells himself this is what would happen in a movie: the desperadoes riding out for one last hurrah. Only in this case, one of them is half-asleep in the passenger seat and has just started to urinate.

It is admittedly a rather hammy premise on which to hang a novel, David Flusfeder's fifth. And if you can't see yourself forgiving him, then perhaps it's not for you. But road movies are about the emotional journey, and here Flusfeder is on interesting ground. Spencer originally wanted to reconnect with his father by learning about his past. But as their movie spools onwards, he realises the beauty of the genre they have chosen: it exists defiantly in the present.

Formally, the novel jumps excitedly around. Chapters kick off with stills from classic movies. Some scenes are written in the assertive, minimalist manner of a screenplay; others are scripted out as such. On occasions, the prose plunges into remarkable lyricism – particularly when describing Jimmy's youth as a Jew in 1930s Warsaw. But this patchwork quality becomes part of its charm, and the story has such momentum that nothing can knock it off course.

Flusfeder wrote the novel after visiting his own dying father in New York – he said in an interview that Jimmy Ludwig is basically his dad. But while born out of grief, the storylines are richly comic. The estranged father and son grudgingly realise they are rather similar; the conceited film-maker discovers his life is more engaging than his films; and the supposedly feeble old man keeps nabbing the last laugh from his son. All this is executed with such tender precision that you end up forgiving that cheesy premise.